I'm using Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon 6.8.0
For a few months now my hard drive will randomly start filling up non-stop until it can't anymore. It seems to happen the most while playing games but it has happened while doing anything else or nothing at all. It seems to often coincide with when timeshift is creating a snapshot or be close to when that happens. It has also happened a few times in a week or once in a month and I can't pinpoint any pattern that's causing it to a good degree of certainty.
The thing that is causing the disk to get full is a bunch of errors and information I can't understand in the syslog and kern.log files. (I'll post screenshots in the replies)
Due to not understanding anything that's going on and having a lot of other stuff in life get in the way, my solution has been to run "sudo truncate -s 0 /var/log/syslog" and then same for syslog.1, kern.log and kern.log.1 to wipe out the logs and then delete whichever timeshift folder copied these logs.
That was working fine until today. PC was ok yesterday but when turning it on today several things happened:
WHILE BOOTING:
1 - PC boots, Mint logo shows up, password is asked and then the screen gets black
2 - Same as 1 but it gets stuck on the Mint logo and nothing else happens
3 - blinking cursor shows up on the top left on a black screen and nothing happens
4 - A prompt to choose to boot with regular Mint or recovery mode shows up and proceeding with regular can cause any of the above but starting in recovery mode, the few times I tried, worked fine but since it deactivates the drivers and I'm a game dev trying to get some work done I didn't keep it like that for long.
5 - One time it just prompted me with the Windows boot launcher from my second SSD which I was using before but haven't used in months (I didn't do this in the boot menu, it should've been Linux). Everything ran fine then, though a bit slow at the start, and I took the opportunity to export some stuff from a few programs that supposedly don't run on Linux so that I could open them in a different program. That took like an hour and everything was fine.
6 - Mint logo then "BusyBox v1.36.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.36.1-6Ubuntu3.1) built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands. (Initramfs) "
ON RARE OCCASIONS PC BOOTS ALL THE WAY:
1 - I put the password on Linux, everything seems normal, I can open and edit stuff but after ~10 minutes whatever window was open gets closed. (Timeshift seems to always be running when this happens but not right after booting but I may be wrong) The remaining windows that I had open still work for a minute or two more but I can't open anything else besides the startup menu. At this point the cursor changes to the Windows cursor too. Opening anything shows a weird clock cursor but nothing ever opens and the cursor returns to normal. When logging out or shutting down, most of the times the text above the options show up as solid white squares but the text in the options "restart, shut down", etc. look fine. One time half the stuff in the startup menu wasn't showing up and one time all the text was fine.
WHILE SHUTTING DOWN
1 - Black screen and it doesn't turn off until I physically turn it off
2 - Blinking cursor but same as 1
3 - Error text shows up. After the errors it was trying to log something into journal but couldn't write or rotate for whatever reason. (I'll post this text in the replies too)
4 - (In Windows/ 2nd SSD the PC could shut down by itself)
EXTRA CONTEXT IN PRECEEDING DAYS
This is probably very silly to mention but the only thing I can think of that was weird/ different yesterday is that I tried running a weird game called "Innards" on lutris. I swear this isn't a promo, the reason I bring it up is because I was the first to get it running on Linux as it is a game from 1 solo dev who made the engine too and I don't know if that could somehow affect the PC. I only thought of this because Lutris is the only place on Linux where I would see the Windows cursor so I thought there could be a connection... IDK it was the only different thing I did yesterday. Other than that, PC was quickly flashing text when turning it on and off for a week or two before this but it has happened before and this didn't happen.
Anyway, any help would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance to anyone that replies, its amazing to me so many take their time to help strangers with weird, tricky issues.